


Last Rites

by foxsgloves



Category: Samurai Jack (Cartoon)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, but i love ashi and i love her whole family so much just let them have peace, i've only seen the new season oops, it could be jashi if you squint really hard but it's pretty platonic really, takes place between ep 7 and 8 in the timeline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-11
Updated: 2017-06-11
Packaged: 2018-11-12 16:08:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11165346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxsgloves/pseuds/foxsgloves
Summary: When Ashi witnesses a family of aliens holding a funeral, she asks Jack to help her do the same for her sisters.





	Last Rites

**Author's Note:**

> I'm still in pain over all six of Ashi's sisters' deaths. This is my attempt at making some kind of resolution over it. Thanks for stopping by to read!

The noise interrupts Ashi in the midst of gathering a handful of berries.  It’s sharp and grating and twangs like a plucked garrote, and she drops the broad leaf she’s been filling with fruit to clap her hands over her ears.

She scuttles up into the fruit trees, jamming her fingers back in her ears when she’s clinging to the highest branch with her thighs.  This is the only decent vantage point for miles and miles.  Clusters of stubby trees knot about the river she and Jack been following.  It is unconcerned with the din, its grey-blue surface ruffled with foam when the wind blusters.  About the river are vast fields of golden grass tall as her waist, gasping in the fits of wind.  She longs for the cool, silent shade of the mountains.  There is no cover for her here.

Jack’s off in the nearby fields digging up some roots he says are good for tea.  Ashi doesn’t like tea much—it’s only hot, bitter water with plant parts floating in it—but the making of it brings him some precious stillness.  She doesn’t need him to track the source of the hideous sound, or to silence it.

All she needs to do is stalk in the direction of her headache.  The sound comes from upriver.  She turns her face to the north and waits for the wind to blow, and when it wails she moves with it, scuttling amongst the bending grass in a low crouch until she can duck behind an outcropping of rock.

The song comes from the throats of a cluster of two-legged creatures.  Shorter than Jack, taller than her, if they stood head to head.  They have three eyes and a coating of scruffy yellow fur that the grass would conceal if they were to duck low enough and stay still.  But they are moving  in a drifting circle about one of their own kind, who lies still on the riverbank, eyes closed, limp claws sunk into the soft earth.

It is dead.  It is dead, and they have killed it.  Ashi coils with her fingertips digging into the pits of the rock, her legs taut for a spring.  Jack is creeping up behind her but he has five feet left to go and he won’t grasp her ankle if she leaps now.

But as they circle, their song twirling about her ears and the inside of her skull, one of them bends low to drape a wreath of flowers about the dead one’s neck.  Another leans low, its dewy black eyes cast downward, and dark spots bloom on the dead one’s hide. 

It is weeping.  Ashi presses her back against the rock and lets Jack place his hand about her upper arm.

“What are they doing?” she whispers, voice smothered by the terrible noise.  Jack has to press his ear right beside her mouth before he can understand her.

“They are honoring their dead,” he says, one hand on the hilt of his newly-forged sword as the song, at last, fades, and she can hear her own thoughts in her head again.  The yellow-furred creatures push their dead one into the river, and it does not sink, but instead floats with the current, its chain of flowers trailing in its wake.

Honoring their dead.  Ashi has never given honor to a dead sister, nor has she ever seen another do so.  Death is failure.  Failure is shame.  The useless carcass of a shameful daughter rots in the place where it falls.

“It has died because it is old,” says Jack, letting his hand fall away from her arm.  “It is the natural way.”  And when Ashi looks more closely at the dead one, floating down and away down the river with a trail of white chop, she sees it has patches of bare skin where the yellow fur has sloughed off, and crinkles about its black eyes.

Ashi only ever knew one human to grow old.  When she was a girl she and her sisters were instructed in combat by another Daughter, Minoru.  Minoru was quick as a shadow and cut keen as a scythe in a field.  Her weapon was the kusarigama, the blade that later would claim Ashi as its own, and its heavy chain tangled her feet and its merciless blade bit her skin every day and every night.

Until Ashi and her sisters grew tall and strong, and Minoru became slow and feeble.  Her kusarigama twirled sluggishly about her head and did not bite Ashi half as often.  Ashi was certain she was sick.  Ashi, too, had been taken gravely ill as a small girl, and did not remember much of this time but shivering in her sweat-soaked bedroll watching the bloom of strange light on the inside of her eyelids.

“You are being tested,” said her mother the high priestess, and turned away.  “If you live, you have proven your body strong.”  None of her sisters came near her during this time, for they feared being struck down themselves.  Ashi knew.  She had done the same, when it was their turn thrashing in the night, hot with fever.  None of her sisters came to her save Kiku, who crept into her bedroll in the deep dark of night, and slept with her back against Ashi’s.  Afterwards she would have thought it a dream, but the back of Kiku’s sleeping-robe was wet through with sweat.  It did not happen again.

She followed Minoru one night to see what ailed her so, and watched through the crack in her door as Minoru peeled her spiked helmet away from a spill of hair white as milk, and her mask away from a face spotty and crinkled as old paper.  Ashi gripped her chest in horror, at what sort of sickness could waste at a person’s skin so, and would certainly take them all one by one in hideous fever.

It was her sister Ran who quelled her fears.  “You’re so stupid, Ashi,” she said with a wrinkle of her lip, without looking up from the back-and-forth swish of her daggers.  “Minoru isn’t sick.  She’s just old.  She’s dying from being alive too long.”

Minoru grew slower and jerkier through every practice until Ashi thought if she stood still she would be able to hear the creak of the woman’s bones.  And she took Hina’s dagger in the meat of her thigh during a spar and they never saw anything of her again.

“Is this natural, too?”  Ashi asks Jack as she trails him back to their camp downriver, rubbing her own forearms.  “Is it natural to honor the dead?”

“Yes.” Jack tucks his hands away into his wide, belled white sleeves.

Ran was the first of their seven to fall, in the end, a garland of splattered red about her neck.  Left on the riverbank.   Then the others, one by one by one.  Aoi, Etsuko, Hina, Kiku, Yua.  They plummeted so quickly into the blank white sweep of snow she did not know who fell first, or where.  Their white masks all looked the same in the snowfield.  She ought to have known.  She ought to have seen.

She sits beside Jack at the fire, which has smoldered down to weak ashes, and swallows a few tasteless bites of boiled tubers and crushed berries.  “How do you do this?  How did you honor your dead ones?”

Jack waits a long time before speaking, and his eyes grow large and fixate on something in the distance.  She does not know whether he sees something true or not and she shrinks away from the fire.  At last he draws his hand in arc across the dirt and speaks for her the old rites of his people, which he struggles to remember properly, tugging across time like a weary fisherman at the end of a long line.

“The fallen person is cleansed and laid out in a holy place, and the priest speaks the last rites over them, and then they are burned and the ashes kept, in the holy place or in the home of their family.”

Ashi’s mother was their High Priestess.  She spoke many rites, but only ever to her living sisters and daughters, and this was always to rage and thunder, to thrash about on the altar in the throes of possession, gasping in a strange tongue which not even her most favored sisters were given leave to know.

She wonders if her mother ever performed these rites alone, with only herself and the body, in the hollow light of the red candles on the altar.  Perhaps it was so. But she very much doubts it.

She sits with her legs curled beneath herself, letting some of the ash from the sapped campfire sift through her fingers.  “I do not have any bodies to cleanse or to burn.”  The great creature that erupted from the deep and crushed whole miles of earth in his maw would have swallowed them all with the splintered trees of the forest.  A step a sliver of an inch high or low, a fall to the forest floor with an angle only a hair sharper, and she would lie with them, her bones ground to dust between the monster’s teeth.

Her mother would call this destiny.  Ashi is not so certain.

Jack closes his eyes and there are wide blue hollow underneath them. They were instructed he did not age, and his skin is smooth as a young man’s, but all the same he looks very old, as old as Minoru before Hina’s blade.  “Oftentimes small offerings would be burned along with the body.  Little candies and flowers and such.  If one… did not have a body, the little offerings alone would suffice.” 

Well, they’d have to, wouldn’t they.  Ashi stands and brushes dust from the leaves of her skirt.  “I’ll do that, then.  I’ll burn offerings.  But what is candies?”

They trundle back to the nearest town further up the riverbank, a little cluster of mud huts, where there is a small marketplace filled with golden-furred creatures, the same as the ones who sang by the riverside.  They make the sound at each other all the time, when they are frustrated or surprised or joyful, although it is a bright and musical noise, only hideous with grief.

Jack buys her a handful of little spheres wrapped in shiny plastic, pink and green and orange.  He puts one of the green ones in his mouth and his whole face scrunches up.  She giggles.  

The green ones are sour, but the others are sweeter than fruit.  She has eaten these before, or something like them, though she did not know what they were called.  Aoi helped her steal them from one of the few traders who brought food and weapons to the Daughters in their hollowed-out mountain.  Aoi was the best at watching, because she had wide eyes like still, deep black pools, and she was so quiet when she hid her herself inside boxes or shadows that no one found her, not even Mother. 

Ashi only ever heard her laugh once, when she took a bag of candies from one of the trader’s pockets, and the two of them shared them together.  They had never tasted anything so sweet, and gagged on the too-bright balls, shivering with laughter.

Mother found the shiny wrappers all crumpled up in the foot of Aoi’s sleeping roll, and then she took the remaining ones in her hand and made them fight to third blood over who would get to eat them.  Ashi won, but she had a long slash on the inside of her thigh and got sick from eating all the candies at once.

The sweet candies for Aoi, then.  And there are some others which are supposed to be medicinal, in faded colors and with a sour but soothing aftertaste.  These she will give to Kiku.

For Hina, a little paper box of creamy wax that smelled of lavender.  Hina’s hands were always chapped white and scabbed, dry from gripping her weapons, and she rubbed them together with a rasping sound.  Sometimes she saved butter from festival dinners to rub into them.

For Etsuko, a wooden whistle carved by one of the golden-furred creatures that makes their sound when Ashi blows into it.  Not the hideous sound, but reedy and joyful.  Etsuko made herself a song when she would try to learn the steps of a combat sequence, each placement of her foot accompanied by a staccato hum.  Mother ground the haft of her spear into Etsuko’s foot to make her stop.  But still, when she fought, she tilted her head to the side, bird-like, and Ashi knew she still heard the music, though only in her mind.

For Yua, the feather of a great bird itself, glossy and beetle-green.  They had not known birds even came in such colors.  They had only ever seen one, a bone-white downy thing that squeezed into the tunnels through a crack somewhere and became trapped.  Ashi heard it fluttering about and crashing into stone in her sleep.

“Don’t tell Mother,” said Yua, when Ashi tracked the sound to an old chamber where she cupped the bird in her hands.  “I’ll do whatever you want.  Just don’t tell Mother.”

Ashi didn’t.  But the bird was a terror, scouring Yua’s arms and chest with long, blood-flecked scratches, until Mother did find it, and made her snap its neck.

That’s five.  Aoi, Kiku, Hina, Etsuko, Yua.  Ashi.  And Ran.

Ashi does not know what Ran might have liked.  When Ran was the first to fall, her neck smeared in red, there was a part of her that was glad.  Even now she can feel it, a raw and red gnaw deep within her.  Ran was the reason Mother found Yua’s bird.  Afterwards Ashi punched her in the face and chipped her front tooth, and Ran grappled her about the waist and slammed her nose into the stone floor.

The last day she had seen her was the day before they had finally been released on the world to fulfill their holy purpose.  It was a day of meditation and fasting, and they did not speak to or acknowledge one another from dawn to dusk, until the huge stone door of the mountain yawned open for the first and only time.

She wanted to spend her day sitting in front of the crack in the mountain with the distant sunlight falling over her, but to her shock she found someone already sitting in her place.  Ran’s eyes were closed, head tilted back so her neck lay straight.  She drew the neck of her suit down with one fingertip so the thin sliver of sunlight lay across her naked collarbone like a blade.

Ashi stood there, the silence thick and heavy between them.  At some point Ran finally heard her breathing and turned towards her, her chipped tooth on her bloodless lip in a sneer.  Ashi turned and went to a different tunnel.  They did not speak.

For Ran, a handful of sun-golden flowers with bloodred throats, twisted into a wreath. 

At Jack’s direction Ashi stamps the long yellow grass by the riverbank flat so she can lay her offerings down in a circle.  She stands beside them next to Kiku’s.  Across the ring, Jack waits with a box of cheap matches in one hand, brushing the hilt of his sword with the other.  He will say the sacred words and light the fires.

But he does not speak.  The sun dips low, bloodying the river, and still he stands as motionless as the statues in his image, his head bent.  Ashi wades about the circle of offerings to stand beside him.  In all his statues, he was carved with his eyes tilted back towards the sky, but his head is bowed.

“I am sorry,” he says, lifting his hand from his blade.

“For what?”

He is silent again, his gaze falling on the circle of offerings.

“I don’t understand.”  Ashi finds herself saying this to Jack very often, but usually not with this brittle edge in her voice.

“For this.”  And at first she’s sure he means taking so long, until she sees those old, old blue hollows beneath his eyes.

“Why?” She’s yelling now, helpless to keep her voice from raising or heel grinding into the dirt.  She bites the inside of her cheek.  “It’s not your fault.  It’s not.  It was Mother’s.”  She had sent her daughters as weapons against him.  They had no choice.  He had no choice.  It was obvious.  He was supposed to be the wise one, the one who revealed to her the good of the world.  Why did he not see?

She snatches the box of matches from his limp fingers and stands behind Aoi’s handful of candies with one clenched between her fingertips.  Jack gulps a deep breath and waits while shadows of clouds scud over the river, and begins to speak the words.

Aoi and Kiku’s candies and Hina’s cream burn slow, their smoke heavy and sweet, the sugar melting into pools of caramel before breaking into cinder.  Etsuko’s whistle sings a long, piercing hiss before it crumples.  Yua’s bundle of feathers won’t catch flame at all, and Ashi stamps on it, mouth pinched, until she sees the spines bent and the down split and bends to brush it back into place with gentle fingertips.

Ran’s garland of flowers goes up in a brief blaze and burns to nothing before the match dies. 

Ashi, still crouching, rests her cheek on her knees.  “What do you do afterwards?”

Jack clears his throat behind his trailing sleeve.  “You can save the ashes and keep them in a jar, to carry them around with you.  Or you can bury them in the ground, or scatter them in a special place.  It is your choice.  You knew them.”

But she hadn’t, though.  Not really. 

She considers making a pouch from a broad leaf like the ones in her skirt, to carry their cinder about in as she walked the world, or burying them in a soft grave of river-clay.  But then they would have to stay ash.  She takes them down into the river instead.

They all had their fill of ash.  She thinks maybe they, too, would have liked to bathe in clear water, and emerge with new skin.

She opens her cupped hands beneath the water and the ash trickles away in small streaks.  Her hands are wet and her hair is wet and her face is wet, salt chapping her lips.  She scrubs at her cheek with the heel of her hand.

Afterwards, Jack builds a fire on the riverbank and boils water for tea.  Long, fragrant curls of steam loop over the river and wind about where Ashi sits on a long, flat stone in the water.  Dragonflies flit about and land for rest on her dew-flecked skin, flicking their jewel-bright wings. 

Jack wades into the river to give her a mug and soils the hem of his long white robe.  Ashi does not want tea.  But she cups the mug in her hands because it is warm, and she sits, a little brown fish nipping at her foot wrappings, and watches the river sing and murmur and flow away and away and away, careless of its burden, out of sight and into the great ocean that her sisters will never see.

**Author's Note:**

> #let the sisters have peace 2kforever


End file.
